Wednesday, September 18, 2002

And now, a brief study in avoiding the obvious.

The California Public Utilities Commission has published a
report on what power generation companies were doing during the
power crisis which briefly led to rotating blackouts last year. Their
claim, at the time, was that they couldn't meet even off-peak winter
and spring demand due to lack of capacity. This claim was a little
mysterious, as winter demand is substantially much lower than summer
demand, and there had not been blackouts in previous summers --- but
they fudged this by saying that plants were off-line for maintenance.

But it turns out that even the plants off-line for "maintenance"
can't account for the shortfall:

For example, on May 8, 2001, there were two-hour blackouts
caused by a shortage of 400 megawatts of power in Northern and
Southern California. But Duke Energy had about 1,000 megawatts of
available capacity that was not used that day, the commission report
said. "Thus, Duke alone had more available and unused power than the
total amount of power that was needed to avoid the blackout that day,"
it said.

So, why were operable plants being kept idle in the midst of a
power crisis? Could it be... that they were running up the price?

Now, now, says the commission, let's not jump to conclusions:

The commission did not directly accuse the companies of deliberately
trying to drive prices up. Officials said investigations were
continuing into possible price manipulation and collusion among the
companies.

And what do you know, we have a real-life case of
just plain bad reporting in the Times. It satisfies the American
journalists' fetish for "balance" by uncritically repeating spin from
utility spokesmen that some of the plants in question were off-line
for, among other things, the installation of pollution control
equipment, trying to shift blame to eeevil regulators. But the actual
report says up front that it counts as "available power" only
power that was reported by the generators themselves as
available on a particular day, "accepting generator claims of plant
outages and mechanical problems at face value".

In short, the utility line was just false, and the Times failed to
say so. Gee, I wonder whether the Times-obsessives in the blogsphere
will be complaining about this particular piece of sloppy journalism?